Runaway girl's call leads to molestation charges against man

December 17, 2010

Five days after she ran away from her South Side home, an 11-year-old girl called her uncle after hearing his impassioned plea on a local radio station for her to contact him.

Within an hour of her phone call, frantic efforts to find the girl by her family, a community activist and Chicago police ended when she was found just blocks from her parent's home in the apartment of a man now charged with sexually assaulting her.

"She was crying because I was crying," the girl's uncle said after a bond hearing for Derrick Turner, 53, who was ordered held Friday in lieu of $200,000 bail on the charge of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child.

The uncle, who is not being identified by the Tribune to protect the identity of the victim, said his niece ran away from her home on Dec. 10.

On Tuesday, he appeared on WGCI-FM begging her to call. At about 2 a.m. Wednesday, his phone rang.

"She said she didn't want to tell me anything that happened over the phone," the uncle said. "She asked if I could come and pick her up."

On another line, the uncle was coordinating the search for the girl with activist Andrew Holmes, director of No Guns No Violence, a nonprofit group. Holmes had a contact who quickly traced the number that had turned up on caller ID.

Holmes said he raced over to the address in the 6100 block of South University Avenue, and he and the uncle told the girl by phone to switch a light on and off so they could find her exact location in the apartment building. Police arrived within minutes, Holmes said.

Turner is alleged to have met the victim four days earlier on a Green Line "L" train and invited her to his home out of the cold.

Prosecutors said the girl lied about her name and told him she was 18. Under Illinois law, Turner didn't need to know the victim was under age 13 to be convicted of predatory criminal sexual assault.

The uncle said that the girl was having a difficult relationship with her mother. A spokesman for the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services said the agency has had no previous contact with the family and had not initiated any investigation since she was found Wednesday.